Al-Qaida warns of more London destruction

Ayman al-Zawahri, al-Qaida's second-in-command, speaks in a video aired by al-Jazeera in which he warned Britons that Tony Blair's policies will bring more destruction to London.Photograph: al-Jazeera/Reuters

Osama bin Laden's deputy blamed Tony Blair's foreign policy for the London bomb attacks in a video broadcast today and warned of "more destruction" to come.

Al-Qaida's No 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, said the suicide bombings in London on July 7, described as "volcanoes of wrath", had followed the UK's rejection of an offer of a "truce" from al-Qaida conditional on withdrawing troops from Iraq.

In a message broadcast this afternoon on the Qatar-based al-Jazeera television station, Zawahiri said: "Blair's policies will bring more destruction to Britons after the London explosions, God willing."

Downing Street refused to make any immediate comment on the tape, which is the first message from al-Qaida's inner circle to directly mention last month's suicide bombings in which 52 people were murdered.

Tonight the US president, George Bush, said he would not be deterred by threats from Zawahiri, who warned that the US faced worse casualties in Iraq than in Vietnam.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the prime minister denied the Iraq war was a factor. He said later, after the foreign policy thinktank Chatham House linked Iraq with the attacks, that the war was "an excuse", but argued that terrorists with an "evil ideology" would always find grievances to justify attacks.

Today Zawahiri said that al-Qaida's message was clear: "You will not be safe until you withdraw from our land, stop stealing our oil and wealth and stop supporting the corrupt rulers."

Egyptian-born Zawahiri did not claim responsibility for the London attacks but rather put the al-Qaida stamp of approval on them, which has increasingly become the new dynamic as the terror organisation, deprived of its training camps in Afghanistan, changes in nature.

Analysts have said it is unlikely that the London bombings were directly organised by the al-Qaida leadership in a way that the September 11 attacks were. It is thought that they were more likely to have been inspired by al-Qaida, in a similar way to last year's Madrid bombings, which claimed 191 lives.

The July 7 attacks were carried out by four suicide bombers, three of whom lived in West Yorkshire. However there has been speculation that they could have been orchestrated by a "mastermind" who travelled to the country, recruited Britons and gave them training and help with explosives and fled before the attacks were carried out.

Experts said it was probably no coincidence that the Zawahiri tape emerged on a Thursday, exactly four weeks on from the Thursday July 7 attacks and two weeks after the failed bomb attacks on Thursday July 21.

As the tape was broadcast, around 6,000 police were out in force in a major London security operation today. [Read more here]

Scotland Yard has warned of more attacks, although there is no specific intelligence anticipating an attack today and senior officers have said there is no hard evidence that a "third cell" that is still at large.

The Zawahiri tape is sure to be scrutinised by British anti-terror officers. In it, Zawahiri refers to an audio tape broadcast by the al-Arabiya television station last April in which a speaker purported to be Bin Laden offered a ceasefire to nations deciding not to "interfere" in Muslim countries. The offer was not extended to the US.

In today's tape, Zawahiri says: "As to the nations of the crusader alliance, we have offered you a truce if you leave the land of Islam. Hasn't Sheik Osama bin Laden told you that you will not dream of security before there is security in Palestine and before all the infidel armies withdraw from the land of Mohammed? Instead, you spilled blood like rivers in our countries, and we exploded the volcanoes of wrath in your countries."

Zawahiri also warned the US that "tens of thousands" of its military personnel would die if they did not immediately withdraw from Iraq and that continuation of US aggression against Muslims would make "you forget the horrible things in Vietnam and Afghanistan".

The footage showed Zawahiri wearing white robes, with an AK47 assault rifle by his side. Behind him was a muddy brown sackcloth of a kind often used in al-Qaida tapes to hide geographical features that could provide clues to where they were filmed.

Livingstone calls for Iraq pullout

Zawahiri's comments are sure to rekindle debate about how involvement in Iraq has endangered the UK. In today's Guardian newspaper, the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, argued that British troops should be withdrawn from Iraq to help protect the city from more attacks, because the invasion was "not justified".

Zawahiri is a former eye doctor who merged his militant group with al-Qaida in Afghanistan in the late 90s. Like Bin Laden, he has a $25m bounty on his head and some experts regard him as the prime force behind al-Qaida's ideology.

He last appeared in a video aired by al-Jazeera in June, in which he called for an armed struggle to expel "crusader forces and Jews" from Muslim states and said that peaceful change was impossible.

The last videotape from Bin Laden emerged on October 29 last year ahead of the US elections on November 2. In it he threatened another attack like September 11 and said: "Bush is still deceiving you ... and therefore the reasons are still there to repeat what happened".

Some UK and US officials have expressed anxieties about the media broadcasting messages from al-Qaida. Bin Laden and Zawahiri are suspected to be hiding somewhere around the Afghanistan-Pakistan border are the subject of a manhunt on a huge scale that has so far proved fruitless.

Suspect has Italian court date set

In other developments today, an extradition hearing has been set for August 17 in Rome for Hussein Osman, one of the chief suspects in July 21 attacks, who was arrested in the Italian capital last week. [Read more here]

Ray Kelly, the New York police commissioner, is likely to have caused more consternation in Scotland Yard after disclosing new details about the July 7 investigation, a week after the Met appealed to international agencies to be discrete with shared information.

Mr Kelly said the bombs were probably detonated using mobile phones and the explosives included hair bleach. Scotland Yard refused to comment. [Read more here]